One of the major factors that has made it difficult for cryptocurrencies etc. to get past toys, speculation, and outright scams (as many on HN are so quick to point out) has been the barriers erected by institutions and governments to serious experiments, not least because allowing them to happen involves accepting less control.
So it’s incredibly exciting to see things like this start to take shape. I hope they’re able to deliver something meaningful.
No, Bitcoin just died the same deflation death that the gold standard died from.
It's just that Bitcoin's supply was even less flexible than gold so everything happened much quicker. After all, when the economy got bigger, people dug out more gold which kept the supply of money slightly above the bare minimum necessary to run an economy. That wasn't always possible in the short term. If people literally hoarded gold then miners wouldn't be able to keep up with the demand leading to a recession over the short term.
Meanwhile the Bitcoin economy is in recession for at least a decade. The only part that is still alive is the Bitcoin mining industry.
Recession? Absurd. We have never had anything like BTC before. I can buy more widgets with BTC this year than the year before, and repeat. I expect that I will be able to buy more widgets in future. I see no recession.
Bitcoin is the tip of the iceberg and I didn't mention it intentionally. That is an interesting take, not one I tend to agree with, but also unrelated to the point I was making about the technology more generally.
You don't want to run uncontrolled and high risk experiments in large cities first, given the number of people who would be negatively impacted if things go wrong. And in this case, with cryptocurrencies involved, it is more a case of when rather than if things go wrong, given all the potential points of failure, e.g. price crash or theft or state sponsored attack or coding error or whatever.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 31.2 ms ] threadSo it’s incredibly exciting to see things like this start to take shape. I hope they’re able to deliver something meaningful.
It's just that Bitcoin's supply was even less flexible than gold so everything happened much quicker. After all, when the economy got bigger, people dug out more gold which kept the supply of money slightly above the bare minimum necessary to run an economy. That wasn't always possible in the short term. If people literally hoarded gold then miners wouldn't be able to keep up with the demand leading to a recession over the short term.
Meanwhile the Bitcoin economy is in recession for at least a decade. The only part that is still alive is the Bitcoin mining industry.
That… is not how I would describe Bitcoin activity over the last decade.
I am comfortable with the amount of risk in this experiment and would love to see more like it.